


Not the kind you pray for

by szzzt



Series: World hanging upside down [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Consent Issues, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Tag, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Headaches & Migraines, Hurt Kuron (Voltron), Hurt Shiro (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, I feel Lotor should be a warning, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Japanese Shiro (Voltron), Kuron (Voltron) Deserves Better, Kuron (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Kuron (Voltron) Lives, Kuron (Voltron)-centric, Kuron bae you finally get to fight, Kuron is Ryou (Voltron), Kuron is Shiro (Voltron)'s Clone, Mind Control, Morally gray Lotor, Morally repugnant Lotor, No Sex, Non-Consensual Drug Use, One Shot Collection, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Partial Mind Control, Prosthesis, Restraints, Self-Harm, Sensory Deprivation, Shiro (Voltron)-centric, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Unreliable Narrator, Whump, assertion of one (1) boundary, dubcon inherent to the system, is Trying His Best, migraine auras, the fixitness becomes very meta when salvaging from tumblr, what is the deal with the black bayard, when the system is sending out magically-controlled clones as deepcover agents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-10-26 19:32:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17752112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/szzzt/pseuds/szzzt
Summary: A collection of Kuron fix-its. Each chapter takes a different approach.Not the kind you pray for:He's alive in a borrowed body. What if every time Shiro says something harsh it’s because Kuron feels that way?The skies I'm under:Salvation is very soft-footed, when it comes. There’s no commotion, no steps in the hall; the first that Shiro knows of it is when the door of his cell opens and someone slips in.Hold me fast:Nothing is immutable in this soap-bubble world; the flower that bloomed last spring and the flower that blooms this spring are not the same. The first flower is gone.However, people are capable of surprises that flowers aren't.





	1. Not the kind you pray for

**Author's Note:**

> _Save your breath_  
>  _I know I'm not the kind you pray for_  
>  \-- [Bad Blood by Radical Face](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ty-zbEVu8wg), for all your emo Kuron needs
> 
> The first two chapters were previously posted on tumblr [here](http://szzzt-captain.tumblr.com/post/176907287724/what-if-every-time-shiro-says-something-harsh) and [here](http://szzzt-captain.tumblr.com/post/179752405154/deleted-scene-the-skies-im-under).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's alive in a borrowed body. What if every time Shiro says something harsh it's because Kuron feels that way?

Shiro wants to bite his tongue. But he can't; that's what _she_ had done. He can't pretend his otherself doesn't have these feelings, can't stopper up the words in his mouth, can't do that to him again. Even when they're acrid and poisonous and hurtful enough that his own black humor can't quite cover it.

He can feel the others drawing away, shocked, and it gives him a pulse of guilt and satisfaction and wanting to hit again. Wanting to _prove_ every awful word is true by demonstrating how he can destroy--

He puts his hand to his chest, gauntlet flexing uselessly on the hard breastplate. The air hurts in his lungs and in his throat, but he manages to pull it in slowly and fully and just explain the rest, no embellishments. If he's breathless, the amplification will cover for it; the most anyone can notice is his voice going soft, no snap or edge or force to it at all.

When he's done and the paladins have talked it out, Pidge reaches over and deliberately cuts the comm. "Shiro?" she says. "You weren't."

"What?"

"Evil. The clone wasn't evil."

Shiro really does bite his tongue, because with that his otherself is stuck in a replay of Pidge with a horribly cored look in her eyes, and Pidge's bayard, and Pidge deciding not to fire in the short window before she loses the chance forever. All the words welling up here are Shiro's own, and he really doesn't want to say _I'll do you one worse. He wasn't dead either._

"He would disagree with you on that," Shiro finally scrapes out.

"Would he," Pidge says, and angles her head to look at him better, light glinting off her glasses. "How much of him is you?"

The line of consoles digs hard into his back and Shiro holds up his hand, empty. He can't make himself touch a weapon, even now; he'd all but blocked the black bayard out of Keith's hand when Keith absently tried to pass it over.

"Shiro," Pidge says more gently. "It's all right. I won't hurt you or let you hurt me. I can take you down in the Green Lion's cockpit faster than anywhere."

She probably can. He sidles away from her anyway, folding himself down to sit in a corner with nothing particularly delicate or important nearby. 

"Most of him," he says, after a while. "And most of me. We both…lost things."

Breathing, for one. Feeling little things like hunger or anger or _self_ as separate from the universe. He lied, earlier; there's no routine that can hold out against infinity, not when infinity is the only thing you can see.

_You realize what a bad idea it is to bring the dead back to life? That never ends well. There's always a price._

A price that this time, someone they could spare had paid gladly. He thinks he's sane now, tamped down inside the clone's finity, bounded and contained into a self that speaks and acts and pushes back against these other forces all the time. He can remember things like wearing helmets and keeping the air inside the Lion. He probably won't kill everyone accidentally.

Shiro leans his head back against the wall. "We might make a whole person someday, if we keep trying."

"Keep trying," Pidge says. She's concentrating on flying, not looking at him anymore, and the line of her mouth is firm. "He owes me, and I haven't forgiven you either. That's my price."

Shiro laughs. It's small and warm and unfair, and being alive is all those things. "I'll get right on it, then."

"Evil clone zombies don't ride free on my Lion," Pidge says, and he can see the smile now. "See that you do."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was of course in response to a specific line of dialogue in an s7 (??) episode. I'll copy it into the chapter if/when I track it down.
> 
> #this is a callout post for #shirogane takashi  
> #for not wearing his helmet in hard vacuum  
> #and going through reentry on the OUTSIDE of a spaceship #without a seatbelt #what kind of example are you setting sir


	2. The skies I'm under

Salvation is very soft-footed, when it comes. There's no commotion, no steps in the hall; the first that Shiro knows of it is when the door of his cell opens and someone slips in.

Paladin armor. Shiro tries to straighten up. He's been sitting very still, cradling his ribs with his non-existent right arm, which is the only part of him that doesn't hurt. They took the prosthetic away immediately when they recaptured him and that was a long time ago, but the phantom limb sensation is strong enough that pretending to use it can give some pain relief. The placebo effect, or just more wires crossing in his brain.

It's the black paladin armor, which is odd enough that Shiro isn't sure whether to relax. He can't defend himself, but he stays tense as the figure comes closer, and twitches a little as they shine a dim light at him for a better look.

They touch the side of their helmet and say "It's Hoshi. I found him." He can just catch the edge of a tiny, tinny explosion of voices. The dark eyes inside the helmet watch him as the person adds "Conscious but injured. Don't know how bad," then winces. "Muting you all for a minute, sorry guys."

They sound human, but it's not Keith and who else would wear that armor?

The figure takes their helmet off and it's him. Shiro stares at his own face. He doesn't know what sick game this is, but there's always more and worse to learn.

He knows his horror is showing. He's no good at concealing his expressions anymore -- there just doesn't seem to be any point to it, like there isn't any point in talking to the guards or the medics or the scientists on this base. He has no words left that he wants to share.

The other him blanches a little, and sits on his heels without trying to come closer. His hair is different from how Shiro used to keep it: sleek with no undercut, shorter white bangs that stick up like a dandelion poof yearning for freedom. Otherwise the illusion is casually, offhandedly perfect, down to the scar across his nose.

He has both arms, and his armor is so pristine. Wouldn't it be nice if he's real, and these months were the dream?

"Shiro?" the other him says softly. "Can you walk?"

Shiro stiffens, which hurts. He can't make a sound at first, but then his voice does come, croaky and raspy. "You're sure that's what you want to call me?"

The other him meets his eyes steadily and without pity, like he knows exactly what Shiro's thinking. "The whiz kids proved I'm not the original. We think you are, but if you're not--" he shrugs. "You wouldn't be alone."

Shiro doesn't react. His eyes are stuck on the armor again, and on the paladin's right arm. Their glance follows his, and widens as they notice that Shiro's own right arm isn't lost in shadow, isn't tucked behind him; it ends just below the elbow.

Other him looks up at his face, then back at the stump, with an _oh_ look. _So that's what it looks like underneath._ It isn't fully organic; the elbow joint is boxy and partly rebuilt, with empty insertion points for the bones of the prosthetic, and cords of reinforcement stand out in the muscles of Shiro's upper arm and shoulder. He's thin. They have no need to keep him at fighting weight when they don't want him able to fight.

The other him leans in and says quietly, "Hey. Either I'm a trick, or I'm real and here to rescue you, or this is all in your head. Two of those don't hurt you, and one leaves you better off. We both know that this is laughably more complicated than they need to mess with you. What do you have to lose by playing along?"

Shiro brings his eyes back up. "You could be real and here to kill me."

"That's true. But they tell me I have free will now and let me tell you, buddy, I don't want your job."

"Oh." Shiro digests that, frowning. In the end it isn't the joke or any of the reasonable logic that decides him; it's that soft _hey_. It's how the other him has different hair, and how young he looks with it.

"My knee is messed up," Shiro says. "Cracked ribs on the same side. Tried to block with my arm." He gestures at the stump. "They left the nerves turned on, so I keep thinking it's still there."

It means no walking and no supported limping, either, unless they're willing to risk making the ribs worse. If it were just the ribs Shiro would risk a punctured lung to move fast, but that's not happening with this knee. The other him hisses through his teeth. "All right. I'll carry you, but _tell me_ if it affects your breathing."

And then he pulls his bayard. "You take this."

The black bayard. Shiro flinches back against the wall of his cell, human arm up and teeth bared, but the other him just holds it out. "Your left hand's okay, right?" he says, then waggles it, letting it dangle with the grip across his open palm. "If this is a hallucination, it hardly matters. I won't have a hand free. You might as well take it."

In a daze, Shiro lowers his guard, then reaches out and wraps dirty fingers around it. For a second they're both touching it, bare skin and gauntleted prosthetic, and the other him blinks as he lets go.

Shiro draws the bayard toward himself, and reality moves around him. "It's real," he says blankly. It's more real than he is, more real than anything he's felt in this half-life. It's too light to be as vast as it is. He doesn't know which of them is supposed to be the weapon and which is supposed to wield the other.

"I hope you have some clue how to use it, because it never worked for me. Now let me know if this hurts too much." The other him gathers him up while Shiro is still staring at it, Shiro's remaining arm going around the back of his rescuer's neck with his hand clutching the dormant bayard and wavering near his jaw.

With a quick check-in on the comms, the other him edges them cautiously out of the cell. Once out in the straight corridor he speeds up to a trot, and every step comes with a jarring jolt that makes Shiro's vision darken from the edges. Shiro clamps the stub of his right arm against his side, cradling his ribs. He's sweating with pain somewhere under the shock and the astonishment of holding this bayard again.

The first and only other time he'd held it, they were Voltron and they were fighting. The thick glitter of lives on Zarkon's throneship, the small bright speck of the castle, the flotsam of smaller Galra ships all around this system's great ring-stations like clouds of darkened houses with their mostly-automated crews. His mind had been open as far as it could go. Just taking the bayard had extended his range enormously, and he had a split second to wonder if Zarkon had used it like that, if the Emperor was hunching half-blinded by its loss in his own pilot's chair while Shiro gaped and Keith-Pidge-Hunk yanked him back on task.

He takes as deep a breath as he can, grips it furiously in his only hand, and opens his mind.

_Somewhere, the black lion chirps with delight and bumps him hard between the shoulderblades._

Other him staggers and bounces hard off a light pillar. "What was that??"

His hand goes cold/hot with quintessence, an intimately familiar feeling but one that he's never felt with his _left_ hand before. Shiro peels open his eyes and sees the bayard activated, its form shining blinding white as it dissolves and flows up his arm, the cold/hot tracing his collarbones and flowing down his chest like a second skin. He has a second to wonder how long the transformation is going to take, how extensive it's going to be and what kind of weapon could encase half his body, when the molten bayard flows down the stump of his right arm and keeps going, out into the air.

And then it's done. Its morphed form is shiny black like a beetle's shell, with a subtle glimmer of violet light along its seams and joints. It completely covers his arm and throat and chest, and his injured leg down to below the knee. And it's made him another arm.

Shiro makes a fist with his right hand. Open. Closed. Open. The lights chase along it as it moves. He's gasping, but with this new armor supporting his ribs he can take deeper breaths without pain. He stretches, and his back and chest pop as his spine extends fully for the first time in days.

"It _definitely_ never did that for me," the other him says, already running faster. "Any chance there's a -- ranged weapon -- in there? Or are we stuck with -- knifehands forever?"

Shiro frantically tries to remember Allura's directions on unlocking bayard forms, coming up with not much. He tries activating it like the Galra hand, but it's like -- like looking for a keyhole on a tree trunk. Trees don't need to be unlocked. Trees are already there, and if you want to go around a tree, you can just -- step around --

Reality blazes and _shifts_ around them.

The black lion stretches with massive lazy grace.

Other him puts on the brakes but still bounces full-length off the back of her cockpit chair, curling around Shiro as they hit the floor. Shiro gasps, spilled out of his grip and bleeding off the energy of the transition with nothing but his own body to use as the conduit. His knee and ribs fizzle with healing and he grabs hard, collar and belt, grounding through the other him's paladin armor and into the lion.

Afterward, Shiro goes away for a little, his mind washed white. From a distance he feels the other him hold him, pat him down for injuries, and heft him up again when he stands. They sprawl together in the cockpit chair and the black lion flies, power unfurling like a flower, and there are other voices from the vid screens, exclamations of joy and pain. It's impossible to forget where he is, whose chest is moving under his cheek.

"What are you?" Shiro asks, when his mind and body and voice are all aligned again. He can feel the other him's body tense.

"I was her trick," the paladin says. "Her spy, until we figured it out. Now I'm your…" He pauses, and eventually chooses "…kagemusha," with a doubtful twist in his tone.

A loyal retainer acting as the lord's body double. Shiro smiles wryly. "What's your name?"

"Kage, I guess."

He cracks an eye open. "Is that the name you want?"

"No. It's just what I told the rest of them to call me when they have to distinguish between us. I told them to call you Hoshi."

Shiro snorts. "Not subtle."

"Hey," the other him protests. "I'd like to see you do better."

"We can do better," Shiro says. "What happened? Would you tell me?"

* * *

"If those bastards at the main house still want the cadet branch to die out, they-- well, I guess they got what they wanted years ago. If I ever go home, I'll have a hard enough time proving I'm alive. They sure won't let me produce a twin from space and add him to my koseki," Shiro says regretfully.

"You could adopt me," other him says. He doesn't sound very enthusiastic.

"I don't _want_ to _adopt_ you." Shiro realizes that could come across the wrong way. "I mean. We might decide that because we share genes, we want to be family to each other. But I don't want to lock you into that. Especially not into an up-down relationship."

Other him hunches his shoulders. "You are older."

"Only physically." Shiro looks at him. "Listen. Do you really want to be a Shirogane? You know I kept it mainly to spite them." There's a reason that, having accomplished that, he then got as far away as he could. "You of all people don't have to be limited by choices I made a decade ago when I was angry and hurting. Why jump into that tire fire when you could just… pass it by?"

"You want me to make up a family name?" Other-him doesn't like that either.

Shiro takes a deep breath. "You could be Shizukuishi."

Other him stares. "You can't promise that."

"That one isn't my name to give, no," Shiro allows. "But Aunt Naori was the only one worth keeping ties with. And I'm sure she had to give my koseki back to those bastards when I was declared dead, but she keeps her own. No one can tell her who is or isn't her family. I don't think she'd turn you away."

Other him hunches further and avoids his gaze. It is a little cruel, to dangle that kind of hope without being able to follow through immediately.

"You still need a personal name. You could be Takashi," Shiro suggests. "No one calls me that."

"No!" the other him says, revolted. "It's still your _name._ I don't want to take your name."

Shiro shrugs. "I always liked the character. If you do too, you could keep the character and use a different reading."

Other him stares, then pauses, obviously struck.

"Mine," Shiro suggests. No one spoke English in space; a name like _Mee-nay_ wouldn't be so tragically mispronounced if no one was getting the wrong idea trying to read it in the wrong language. "Takane. No?"

Other him wrinkles his nose. Fair, those were more likely to be female names.

"Itadaki?" Shiro suggests, deadpan.

"Now you're just messing with me. No."

"There's the on-yomi too..." Shiro tries to dredge it up. "Ryou," they both say together, voices making a weird echo, and other-him stares at Shiro like everything just shifted in his mind.

Shiro tries not to look too smug. "How about trying out Ryou for a few days, so you can decide if you like it?"

Other him nods, dazed. "Ryou," he says. "Shizukuishi Ryou."

* * *

_For the curious:_

白金　嶺　 _Shirogane Takashi_  
雫石　嶺　 _Shizukuishi Ryou_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #is is Kuronweek? I have no idea  
> #but here is a deleted scene from a WIP that is certainly worth being a tumblr ficlet #no beta no revision we impulse-post like men #shameless self-indulgence
> 
> This ficlet shares Aunt Naori and some headcanons about Shiro's family with my longer series [World hanging upside down](https://archiveofourown.org/series/826323).


	3. Hold me fast, part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something's wrong. Something _is wrong_ , it's wrong _with him_ , and it's been getting worse.  
> This time, Shiro figures out what it is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I couldn't help it, I made this collection part of my series [World hanging upside down](https://archiveofourown.org/series/826323) because this installment "Hold me fast" just ended up sharing too many headcanons and other setting details. However! I don't expect that series to have any parallel to the canon seasons 3, 4, 5, or 6, so this story is more of an unofficial far-future "what if." What if those canon seasons did end up happening in W.H.U.D. continuity? But not, of course, in quite the same way.
> 
> Mind the tags. See end notes for a more detailed summary, and please let me know if you would like any tags added.

It's been getting worse.

There are limits to what he can do and what he can say, but they slip out of his head, right through his fingers like dreams. Every time he runs into one, it's a memory he can't move out of short-term into long-term; as soon as he stops rehearsing it, it's gone. He's ashamed it's taken him this long to put the pieces together, but for all he knows he's realized it a dozen times before.

The blinding pain on that last mission, though, and how it nearly doomed the paladins, the shield station, and all the innocents on the planet below. The long, staring silence during debrief when he _couldn't_ tell them what happened, or even acknowledge it had happened. These are external facts that stick with him, and the timeline of evidence is very clear when considered by a tactical mind.

Shiro writes the note without looking at it while Lance is visiting on one of his awkward, dogged check-ins. Shiro doesn't look at the hardlight slate or the stylus he uses, not even peripherally; he looks at his bed while Lance asks him, with various circumlocutions and asides, if he's sleeping better. He doesn't answer. Lance is quick to fill the silences for him.

When Shiro's done writing, he slides the slate off the desk, turns his back and holds it out behind him. Then he goes to make his bed and give Lance time to read. Shiro's been rehearsing how to do this, how to pass a note without seeing it written or received. It's why he was so scatterbrained in training today. He left the writing materials out and his bed unmade on purpose this morning.

He hopes the note is readable. He's literally never written in English with his Galra hand, and his Japanese penmanship with it was atrocious at first.

LANCE I'M COMPROMISED  
HAGGAR USING ME, SPYING THRU ME  
YOU NEED BLINDFOLD, EARPLUGS, CLAMP  
SHOW ALLURA & LOTOR

When he turns around the slate's gone and Lance looks normal, though he's pale. He's been learning a lot lately. He looks straight at Shiro and says, "I want you to know we're all here for you."

Shiro smiles, a perfunctory thing when he wants to scream.

"I'm fine."

* * *

The headaches have been severe today, and it's taking all Shiro has to make it to meals, to make it to the meetings that his absence would cause to fall apart. He's quiet, rubbing his temples, except when the flow of the meeting or some conviction forces him to speak; he doodles a lot, and focuses on the maps rather than the faces when he looks up. He'd rather betray positions than people, though both are bad, of course; Haggar has had plenty of chances to prove that.

Zarkon may be dead, but Haggar has outmaneuvered the Coalition time and again, cutting them off or massing her forces to crush the one weak point in their strategy or their formation. Months ago, their allies celebrated ecstatically at Zarkon's fall. Now these meetings circle around the grim consensus that removing the Emperor has simply unleashed the real mastermind.

But the Blades' targets have not been defended, and in these same months they've done massive damage, far out of proportion to their numbers. The rebels have assassinated two fleet generals and taken an entire sector with a coordinated series of uprisings, and the common thread among all their successes is that Shiro never saw those battle plans.

On the other hand, not all their defeats are actions he was involved in — but enough are. And enough of those turned on plans that very few people saw, and conversations that very few people had.

He's tested this, carefully, over the past few weeks, and now he knows enough to be sure: choosing where he looks is choosing the losses they will take. It's an awful kind of damage control. But the Coalition can afford to give up the places they hold lightly, where they're vulnerable — and with the way Haggar's been harrying them, no one questions his standing orders to fall back instead of digging in. As long as the people survive, the people can regroup.

He gave the note to Lance last night. He doesn't know what's happened since then.

The urge to check on Lotor again is getting strong, although it's been bare hours since this morning, when he went walking before breakfast and found the prince in the hangar with his comet-ship. Lotor had deigned to give him a glance through the floating array of tool readouts. "You have business with me, Paladin?"

Shiro had shaken his head, "Just checking," and caught the edge of a harder, more clinical look as he turned away. If Lotor didn't know about his mother's touch before, he knows now. Lotor has questions burning him from the inside, and he's too smart to ask them yet. Like any predator he's just biding his time.

There are feelings Shiro would have about that, if he weren't so tired, if he were allowed to feel more than wary neutrality toward the new Emperor in their midst. But to be fair, it had been Lotor's own candidly bitter humor, a remark about Haggar spying through the senses of his late former general and her repeated 'idiocy' with Sendak — _the witch never learns_ — that allowed Shiro to finally connect the dots. So he's grateful, in a way.

* * *

His team jumps him on the way to lunch, when his head throbs sharply enough to make him step aside and pause with his hand against the wall. The diplomats and pirates file past, a few giving him glances sharp with sympathy, but no comment. They've seen him rub his temples often enough. They go on ahead, and his thoughts are a blankness of nothing but how long he can afford to stand here if he wants enough time to eat, when Allura steps up behind him in a swish of skirts and cups a hand to his neck under his ear. Her magic pulses a painless, soundless impact through him and Shiro's knees buckle; he falls, as limp as if he'd taken a stunner blast to the back.

"Shiro!" Allura says, sounding very concerned. "Are you feeling all right?"

More than one person is behind him, but it's the princess who caught him. There's a strong grip on his right forearm, fingers meeting around his wrist in a way that indicates she might have grown a few inches. Her shoulder is under his other arm, taking his weight, and her elbow is hooked around his chest with her palm back up at his throat, thrumming warm and full of power. Whatever she's doing is keeping his strings cut, and she's holding him facing the wall, so he can't see the others.

Allura came from the same meeting with him, but the rest of the paladins are scattered to other duties and have been for days. Shiro can't see anyone whose presence here and now in this hallway would be unexplained. Of course. Of course Allura thought of that. Shiro blinks up at the ceiling, head lolling against her jaw. It would be terrifying if Haggar could turn him off like this. Allura must have been watching him all morning, planning and waiting and ready to move.

"'S this headache," he slurs, and blinks like he's fainting, letting his eyes half-close. His head _pounds_ and his muscles twitch, trying to tense up as the adrenaline hits. He doesn't want to be this close to anyone. He doesn't want to be touched.

He forces himself to relax again, to give Allura his weight instead of fighting the half-paralysis. She won't drop him. It wouldn't make sense in the performance they're giving.

He's so tired of charades, so tired.

She lets him sag down to sit on the deck, twisting his Galra arm up behind him in a joint lock that will keep him down, and lets go of his neck. He shudders all over and can't stop himself from drawing up his legs, though he keeps his left hand flat and visible on the floor.

"Coran," Allura says. "Shiro isn't feeling well. Will you help me get him to the infirmary?"

Suddenly Shiro has another arm to lean back on, and someone safe to look at. Coran smiles at him and says, "Your headaches, number one? A varga or two in the pod ought to help." Shiro frowns at him while Coran uses his hand to block the light from the overheads for a minute, then watches Shiro's pupils react. "Yes, rather delayed. Is the light hurting you?"

Another excruciatingly sharp throb makes Shiro wince, and everything acquires halos that are bright and dark at the same time. Bright zigzag moire shadow-edges, more vivid than the real world. When he's aware again there's a ruthlessly businesslike hand pulling his head back and up by the longer hair over his forehead. Keeping him looking at the wall, Shiro realizes, and holding his head still. Thank god for Allura. "Yes," he manages, voice husky. He tries to add _Sound too,_ but he can't, damn it, he can't volunteer his symptoms, can't describe the pain with anything but _yes_ or _no._ How did it take him so long to notice?

"Some rest is just what you need," Coran says briskly. "Now, Pidge told me that decreasing sensory stimuli can help, for humans having brain spasms." Shiro stares at him, and Coran nods. "We'll take care of you. You'll be all right. Just close your eyes and relax." There's nothing in his face or words that will tip Haggar off. Shiro snorts a laugh, and closes his eyes. Zigzags crawl and bloom in the darkness, over the afterimage of the empty wall.

Smaller hands — Pidge. Shiro takes a deep breath. Pidge taps his forehead gently as a warning, then touches some kind of soft pad against his cheekbone before moving it up, over his eye socket. The pad molds to his skin as she presses it into place, a little sticky, holding his eye closed. The same on the other side, then a standard Altean bandage wrap over top and around his head, the soft elastic band sticking to itself and to his skin. It won't slip.

"That's it, number one, just relax," Coran says.

Another tap on his forehead, another warning. Pidge touches his ear, then pulls on his earlobe and slips something soft into his ear canal. It goes deep, pressed in by the band that lays against the back of his neck, and when she slips the other side in everything goes quiet. No voices, no ambient hiss of air. Shiro works his jaw and swallows, feeling the ear protection slip itself a little deeper, a little snugger. The eye patches are new to him — they must be medical supplies — but they've all used the ear protection before when Hunk and Lance discovered bayard upgrades that fire explosive rounds, and once or twice to practice comm failures.

"Test," Shiro says. "Test. _Toukyou tokkyo kyokakyoku._ "

It's an interesting property of the translators that they depend on at least one person in the field's radius — usually the speaker themself — hearing and understanding the spoken words. Without the resonance of that first person's understanding, all any listener hears is the raw sound.

Haggar can see through his eyes and hear through his ears. He doesn't think she can hear his thoughts; he's considered and dismissed battle plans much worse than the ones that nearly killed them, and he's silently noted weaknesses that have never been exploited.

He doesn't think he can hear himself now. His lungs expel air, his lips and tongue and throat move to shape it, but his voice is silent; his words fall into a well of silence that the noise inside his head will fill soon enough, like it fills the soft dark of his room in the dead of night. But it's nice at first, when it's quiet like this. He silently says the tongue twister again, _Tokyo Patent Office,_ and follows it up with his favorite, the long one about leaning a stick of bamboo against the bamboo fence. A finger touches his lips halfway through; he finishes the tongue twister out and then gasps, short of breath.

Someone takes his left hand, turns it palm up, and writes S A F E, one letter at a time. Then three taps, the comm code for _roll call_ or _report._

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," Shiro says. "It took me so long to pass the message, I'm sorry, once I realized I tried to limit—" The touch on his lips again, and he cuts himself off.

E N G L I S H, they write on his hand. Of course. He can't hear himself, so the translators aren't working, they just established that. He pushes his forehead hard into his knees and tries to think through the throbbing and the dizziness, tries to ignore the bright-edged fractals building and falling and building in the space behind his eyes, freed by the darkness to run riot over his visual field. It takes physical effort to dredge up the vocabulary that he hasn't used for day-to-day interaction since…he can't remember. Did he speak English with the paladins before? He must have, for at least that one sun-drenched desert day on Earth, before they came to the Castle. Before that, not since the Kerberos mission and the early days of his first captivity, when Matt and Sam were there.

"S— Sorry," he says. They'll hear his accent. It's not strong — he gave speeches for the Garrison — but it'll be different from the accentless native speech they're used to now from him. "I was slow. To notice. It took me too long and then I couldn't change anything I was doing, but I tried, I tried not to look at anything. I gave suggestions in the meetings but you should not trust them I think." Weird grammar. He tries again. "I _don't_ think you should trust them."

W H Y, they write. Ouch.

"Because some of my suggestions are—" he has to search for the term. "Not from me. Programmed in? _Planted._ They're planted. But I can't tell the difference from the inside."

A shudder runs through Allura behind him and she pushes him forward a little so he's less in contact. Unlike Japanese, all the paladins understand English, so the translators are working for her and Coran.

Shiro curls himself tighter. "Nocxela was a trap and I walked us into it. We would have died, most of the Coalition would have died, if not for Lotor disrupting her spell. I'm so sorry. It was my fault. Keith almost—" But Keith may not thank him for dragging his private business out here in front of everyone. Shiro cuts himself off and casts around. "Ah. Since Lotor came on board the planted suggestions have changed, now they're less persuasive, more like orders, I can spot them a little better—" He twitches his head to the side, cringing through a bolt of pain. "They— uhhhh—" The pain swells and peaks and he loses words. It's like someone smashed his head against something, smearing his vision with false color. He can't breathe, can't think.

He's wondered, these last few days, if he'll die of a stroke or an aneurysm; if one of these pangs will be the last thing he ever feels. The pain feels vindictive. It feels like a punishment.

But so what if he dies? He should have died in the snow, in that lake dweller's grip, in a stolen short-range fighter out of water and fuel and air, but he didn't. He owes it to all their allies to limit the damage, to give his team as much information as he can. He grits his teeth and breathes in short focused huffs, and he waits. It feels like hours, like it did on that last mission, but it was only a couple minutes then.

When the pain lifts, his head is quiet again, and the space behind his eyes is just the soft dark fuzz of static. He's in a different position, on his side, with his left arm around his head and someone touching his temple. He tastes blood, and his nose is running. Ew. He tries to lift his hand to wipe at it and isn't sure if he succeeds, but more terrifyingly, both of his arms are free. He shifts and slithers his prosthetic arm out and hugs it to his chest, clamping the Galra hand under his real arm. If it lights up it'll burn him first, and that's better. That'll give them some time.

Why did Allura let go? Do they not understand how dangerous he is? The taste of blood won't go away.

"The clamp, you need to clamp my arm, a clamp," he swallows, "please, please, please, please—" They don't want to hear that, no one wants to hear that. He cuts himself off, to rapid panting and a hiccup, the next time he swallows.

_You all beg the same. So earnest. But nothing new in it._

He stiffens, and the hands pat his hair frantically. He shakes his head, shakes them off. Haggar won't. Won't get that from him this time. There's no gag in his mouth, no muzzle, and he'll bite if she touches him again.

_He never begged. He knew it would make no difference to us; someone had already taught him that, long ago. But you, a slate wiped clean? You always think it's worth a try, at first._

His own words, pushed ragged from lungs that don't want to work, the bubble of his own blood in his mouth.

_So why — make all this work — for yourself._

A vice-grip on his chin forcing his head up until his neck creaks, a yellow slit-eye looking into his. He tries to bite but he can't move his jaw, can only bare his teeth. _Why? Because I will get my prize from you, Champion. Sooner or later._

Gritting his teeth on the question. He doesn't know what she wants from him.

Doesn't want to know if he already found out, once or twice or many times. Doesn't want to know how many times she's wiped his memory and started again.

_Concern._ Three taps on his shoulder. Three taps on his _face_ and Shiro jerks back, yanks against the new grip on his wrists, but the touch returns to his shoulder, relentless. _Taptaptap._

Report. He has to… Shiro takes a breath, reeling. "I'm. I'm not." There's nothing in his mouth, no iron-hard fingers on his jaw. He scrubs his face on his shoulder, trying to wipe off the memory of the touch — was that during his first captivity? But she never responded to him then, not like a conversation, not when he was just a slave with the resilience to survive her work — his second captivity? The thought comes with a rush of nausea. He remembers even less of that, for all the months they must have had him, and he's been _grateful_ that he doesn't remember.

Hands touching the sides of his head, and he shudders away but oh, they're just holding down the blindfold, tracing the edges of it and the eye patches so he can feel the soft pressure and be reminded that it's there. The touch feathers over the band holding in the earplugs as well, not pressing hard, but enough to make sure it's seated. Shiro swallows and stops rubbing against his shoulder with an effort. He mustn't dislodge either of those.

_Taptaptap._

He's shaking, now that he's still, and he can't seem to straighten up from his protective hunch or tell if the blood on his lips is real. It's hard to breathe. "Flashbacks," he manages. "Blurring togeth…" He can't finish the word. He gasps and chokes, trying to get air, but it's caught on the nausea and whatever's blocking his throat, constricting his chest.

He tries to curl up but there's something in the way, so he bends forward as far as he can, gagging and choking. It burns. It's hard to sort out — this feels like another punishment, something _she_ would do — but he know it's not. This is just his own body, his own mind. It's happened before, though he can't remember when.

An older memory floats up — the arena. He'd won and then folded up on the sand, lights and faces and surroundings blurring, and the guard had kicked him for needing to be dragged out and then not even being injured. _I'll give Medic something to look at. Wasting my time, worthless, nothing._

He hadn't been worthless. He hadn't been nothing. He was Champion, even then, and he's still Champion, even now. That's what Haggar calls him in his dreams. She doesn't deny he earned it. The thought gives him back a little bit of the icy calm he's been using to endure these past days and weeks, and he gets a little air into his lungs. Tries, and tries, and repeats the feat. Panic attacks end. It won't kill him.

He gets a little more air, and a little more again, a full breath. He's still shaking, his face and hand buzzing from the adrenaline and the lack of air. Damn. Only Keith had seen one of those, until now. It isn't that he's ashamed, it's just…ironic, how quickly and completely he crumples when the last load is removed. An enemy could take advantage of that. Oh, wait.

After a timeless time they urge him up to sitting and then to his feet, and he goes. He's breathing almost normally. Someone cleans his face with a damp cloth, and someone puts what feels like a water packet in his left hand and prods him to drink. They don't ask him to talk again, and he's too shattered to remember if he's told them everything they need to know.

Hands on his shoulders give him a direction, and he walks. It's not Pidge; she can't reach his shoulders, so it must be Allura or Coran, or maybe Hunk or Lance. Not Keith, of course, with the Blade still out of contact.

He rather thinks it's Hunk. The hands feel big, and there's no hesitation in the signals they give, the slight pressure to _turn_ or _go._ Lance would be good at this too, but Hunk would be the one who's good right away, without practice, fearless in his giving.

He has no idea where they're going, though they've already walked farther than the buffet or the meeting room. Of course they have to stay out of the secured, lighted, public areas of the Castle. Nowhere this strange procession might be seen.

They could walk him into a wall, or off an edge, but they don't. He thinks about it. The Castle has so many hazardous places.

Each step sends a little shock of impact from his heel up through his knee and hip. He stumbles now and again when his head throbs, but the hands shift under his arms to catch him, and when he puts his foot forward the floor is always where he expects it.

Until the hands slow him, and the floor is gone. He wobbles, but it's just stairs. They let him go slow, feeling out each step, and after only five he jars his leg at the bottom. They walk his knee up against something soft and urge him to turn and sit, and he realizes he must be in the paladins' private lounge, at the sunken couch.

They've all come here to talk, and they need to keep an eye on him, so he's here too. He's blind and deaf, so it's safe to talk around and over and about him as much as they need to. He can't stop himself from cringing a little, curling up to try and hide from the unfriendly eyes on him.

He wishes they'd put him back on the floor. Not chained down, no, he doesn't wish that. But it would be easier to deal with this if he wasn't at eye level. If they could look over him as well as talking over him, without this pretence that he's a participant. He's been here before, after all; he knows how to be an object of discussion, and it's safer that way, easier to preserve his real self through it hidden and safe and intact.

A dim explosion of anger, off to his left. Someone's yelling and he can't hear it, but the sense-dep has his old instincts on edge, and he can usually catch enough through the lion bonds to tell when a paladin is having a meltdown. A ripple of concern and pain and ugly low-simmering resentment all around him and he curls up further, but then a different cool hand is taking his right wrist, extracting his prosthetic arm from its tight fold against his side and turning him to pull it straight out behind him in an arm bar, locking his shoulder. Allura again. Her other hand is at the back of his neck, pinning his head and shoulders against the back of the seat. He doesn't resist, and she doesn't shove as hard as she could.

The joint lock doesn't hurt; he's always suspected that his right shoulder is reinforced far beyond what shows on the surface. It gives her plenty of mechanical leverage, though, and it's a safe way to hold him still, as long as she keeps her grip well away from his hand itself. Shiro breathes, and digs his prosthetic fingers into his palm — that doesn't hurt either — and counts Allura's pulse in the steady triple-beat bloom and flush of warmth around his wrist.

Different hands add themselves to his arm, two large and two small, human-hot and sweaty against the metal. Pidge and Hunk roll up his short sleeve and fit the halves of the clamp in place. It clicks together, then powers on with a hum that goes right to the base of his skull and stays there. Shiro makes — probably makes — a sound of relief, then bites his tongue. Too easy to be noisy when he can't hear himself. Pidge pats his elbow, two quick touches, butterfly-light.

Allura lets go of his wrist and he curls his prosthetic arm against his body, fingers digging into the seat. They're safer, they're safer now, with his arm clamped his hand can't light up, no matter what programming he triggers. He tries to slow down his breathing. He mustn't make noise. She's still holding him down, and the guards usually wanted him quiet while he was veiled.

Then she shifts her grip and pulls back his other arm, his human left arm that she could break without much effort. He twists it with a kick of panic down under his breastbone, but can't break her grip or slip out of the lock, and gets his face shoved a little harder into the cushion for his trouble.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

The pin is a good one, his arm locked out straight and his shoulder tight, just on the edge of pain. He's shivering again.

She has no reason to hurt him. She doesn't even like doing this. He breathes, measuring each inhale and exhale. _Aka pajama ao pajama cha pajama._ He can keep a tongue twister on repeat far past the point where numbers break down; even the Druids thought that was creepy, once or twice, before the muzzle became his default and all his words were driven inside.

Other hands — Lance? — cup his left hand, held stiff out at the end of his locked arm, and rub it between them for a long subjective time until his fist relaxes and they can open his palm and trace shaky letters. P A I N K I L L E R S O K ?

"If you have to," Shiro says, or thinks he says. He just has to trust that sound is coming out.

C S E Z U N E E D

What? "C says I need… Coran says I need p—…p…?" He can't say _painkillers_ , damn it, and the attempt triggers a powerful wave of disgust. He grits his teeth and fights through it, shaking his head against the seat back, trying to _think_. That's a planted emotion, that's one of the controls, coupled so close with a restricted word.

Y E S

This means...this means painkillers are probably a good idea. Maybe he wasn't so far off the mark to think of stroke or aneurysm after all. "Okay," Shiro says, and suffers the cold of the topical cleaning wipe and the sting of the hypo just above the inside of his elbow, where there are fewer old needle scars. After his first captivity he remembers wearing a long sleeve, always, all the time. One of so many things that feel less important this time around.

When the drug is in him, Allura lets some pressure off his shoulder. She's just holding him in place now, and his shivering gradually trails off. It's hard to tell whether the hypo is taking effect, until Allura lets go completely and Shiro slithers down the seat back, roundly failing at catching himself. His body feels heavy and his head feels like it's floating away, taking the pain with it. Good. It should stay away.

Someone keeps hands on him, he can't tell where. His pulse beats against their fingertips.

A long formless time. He drifts.

Eventually his thoughts come back, though without the pain. He doesn't remember being moved, but he's in a bed now, stretched out full-length with a blanket over him. His feet are bare.

It takes a while to fight through the disorientation. He's not captured, because he's in a bed. It's not one of the Druids' veils holding him in the quiet dark, because he can feel the blindfold and the band holding in the earplugs. Not so comfortable now; his ears ache distantly where it presses on them, but he can ignore that.

He's still safe. If Haggar tries to peek through his senses now, she'll get only darkness and silence, and assume he's asleep or sedated or in a medpod. And not be far wrong — that hypo wasn't just painkillers. They might have put him in a pod as well; he has no way to know how much time has passed.

It's relevant, because this won't work forever. She'll get suspicious after more than a few hours, and he's not sure how long he can handle the sensory deprivation. He has ways of keeping himself oriented, the methods the Garrison taught him in pilot training and the methods he taught himself in a Galra cell, but he'll get sense-dep hallucinations after a while and that sounds like a recipe for disaster on top of the flashbacks and these people too kind to properly restrain him.

His wrists are free again. He still has the clamp on, but nothing's holding down his left arm. He could just reach across and take the clamp off, or pull off the blindfold and earplugs. Are they even watching him? He's muzzily outraged on their behalf, or on his, or on someone's anyway. It's not all _his_ fault these people have a nearly-dying problem.

He wants to touch the clamp, wants to run his fingers over it and check again that it's there, that it's working. Surely Pidge would have added a lockout so that he can't take it off so easily. Surely they wouldn't leave him alone without that, and without at least a camera on him. Surely.

Shiro digs his nails into his human palm with a small sharp pain, and doesn't touch the clamp. He doesn't know what kind of programming he might trigger. He can't risk it. He won't.

If Keith were here, Keith would be watching him. The thought is comforting. This is probably Keith's room, closest to the medbay, where they kept Shiro after they found him in that stolen fighter, too weak to hurt anyone but still coming up fighting at every bright light and hard surface. He reaches out, finds a wall to the right and a void to the left, and then nearly knocks over a heavy container on a low table. It's a cylinder…a cup. With a lid.

Shiro sits up and braces on both arms as the world turns inside-out a few times, then starts a slow spin. His head throbs with the change in position and he's fiercely thirsty. He can _smell_ the water in the cup, and he can smell fruit and the savory bread-and-cheese things that Hunk baked the other day. The hunger is so strong and sudden it hurts, like someone kicked him in the chest.

The water helps with the distant low-level headache, once he manages to find the hole in the lid with his lips and drink without tilting too far in one direction or the other. Putting his back against the wall doesn't help as much as it ought to; his sense of up and down keeps drifting in what is clearly an inaccurate way, as he can tell from spilling sudden cold wet down his neck. It's like being in microgravity but still having to deal with gravity, which is unfair. He nearly falls out of bed reaching for the food, and he's glad when he finds it's in a covered bowl that he can drag to his lap without holding it level. He curls around the food, leaning up against two walls in the corner of the bunk, and lets himself eat as fast as he wants without choking or getting sick. He doesn't have to _act normal_ here, he doesn't have to match the pace of anyone else.

He's still hungry when he's done, but it's a much smaller hunger, friendly and familiar. The world still spins, but its axis has shifted to a vertical one, and his sense of up and down is better. Keeping a hand on the wall, he's able to get out of the bed and walk carefully to the ensuite bathroom and back. He refills the cup while he's there.

This room _is_ Keith's, its layout an exact mirror image of Shiro's own room, but it's been cleared; there's no jacket on the peg and the shelves in the bathroom are bare, not that Keith had much to start with. The low table is the only furniture. Shiro suspects that if he felt for the door, he'd find the lights off and the lock overridden to keep him in. He doesn't try. It would be too tempting to take the blindfold off, and seeing the clamp on his arm would be just as damning to anyone watching through his eyes as seeing all the paladins arrayed and ready to take him down.

He wraps himself back up in the blanket. The spinning sensation is persistent. If it's a sense-dep illusion and not just an aftereffect of the drug, then he's had the blindfold on for at least a day — 20 vargas or more — and he's missed lunch and dinner and breakfast and lunch again, which would account for the hunger.

That's well into the danger zone. Even when Coran makes him take a few hours to lay down in a dark room, his headaches have never kept him down for this long.

How patient is Haggar? How likely is she to believe he's in a pod?

Has she gotten what she wanted from him yet? He can't stop a shudder of nausea. She can't have thought he would survive undiscovered forever. How much, in the end, does she care?

His right hand rubs the blanket, then the cup, the blanket, then the cup. He can feel individual strands of the yarn and how they interlock together; he can feel microstriations in the smooth extruded material of the cup, textures much finer than his human fingers can distinguish. Textures different from anything he felt in the pens. He rubs his mouth and nose hard with his left hand. No muzzle. He can smell the Altean soap from the bathroom on his hand, and that centers him even better than the soft comfort of the mattress. He'd hallucinated mattresses, when he was very tired, but never smells; never _good_ smells, at any rate.

He drinks again, and nestles the cup so it won't tip over, then lets his hands fall open and still, one and the other. Lets the tension ebb out of his body piece by piece, breathing as long and slow as he can. If thinking could trigger anything, it would have already. He has time. He has recent events in a clear logical sequence to fixate on; he won't lose the thread of his thoughts over and over. He has the blindfold and the ear protection and the cold stiff band of the clamp around his bicep.

Like a frog in hot water, he's lived with the wrongness so long that there were times he started to wonder if this was normal — if his memories themselves were tainted. But he never quite believed that.

He's compromised. Whatever he preserved the first time, whatever part of him they didn't break — that part did not make it through the second time. He's known that for a while. It's not his memories that are tainted. It's him.

He might be making a noise now. He buries his face in the blanket that does still smell very faintly of Keith, and in the pillow that just smells clean. It's a good blanket, but it's not as warm or soft as the one he remembers having in the Galra cells, the one that must have been a tactile hallucination just like his mattresses. The one that he can't shake the feeling he still _ought to have_ , that Lance made a hopeful little joke about borrowing once, and why would Lance _say that?_ How would Lance even know?

Lance had looked crushed when Shiro asked what he was talking about, and never brought it up again.

Just like Keith had looked crushed, over and over, when Shiro couldn't do it. Couldn't say the right words, couldn't make the right decision, couldn't be _what they needed_ , not anymore.

But they still _needed_ , even if not as badly as before, and he was all they had. So he tried.

He tried, and failed — so he gathered them more allies, and willingly sold his image, and gingerly attempted to avoid the essential roles, for all the good that's done in the end. He _knew_ he wasn't safe. He'd known, leading Voltron for the first time, that if he was captured again the Druids wouldn't simply use him for research. He wasn't just a slave anymore; he was infamous, the spearhead of a direct and public and intimate strike against the Emperor, one lodestone of a groundswell of rebellion.

He'd known that if he was captured, steps would be taken to end that threat. An example would be made. Zarkon's political grudge and Haggar's personal one would be served, and Shiro would not survive, not as a person who could be the Black Paladin. He'd barely survived the first time.

Yet he'd been able to function, when he woke up on that cruiser. He'd known his name, despite how long his hair was, despite his blank memory and worst suspicions, so he'd let himself hope.

This whole time, the lions have known better. He should have listened. Something essential in him is broken badly enough that he can barely hear them, and the black lion's rejection had confirmed it. Why hadn't he listened? The Druids got to him this time. They got in his head and made him into poison and he's no good anymore.

Shiro grits his teeth, in the quiet dark, and shakes his head against the wall of the bunk, rolling his skull against the cool hard surface. He tries not to make a noise, over and over and over.

* * *

Some unknown time later, the air shifts and Shiro comes awake.

It's not a paladin; his connection to the lions is weak, but he can pick up enough to tell when a presence he senses is one of them. Coran? More food? He would take more food, even if they can't communicate while Shiro has the ear protection on.

He doesn't smell food, though. He smells leather and dried flowers and ozone.

Lotor.

Shiro struggles up and stops at a firm hand on his chest. The hand moves up to grip his jaw and with a little prod of pain, Lotor pulls one of the earplugs out.

"Be still. Don't fight me." Lotor's voice, arch and commanding.

"Don't," Shiro says, but there's no force behind it. His hands are on Lotor's wrists, but his grip is loose, and Lotor makes no effort to shake him off. With another pop of pain, the second earplug comes out and Shiro can hear his breathing, loud and rough, and Lotor's calm and controlled, and the ambient hum of the air in the room and the lights in the hall, so loud.

"Be calm. You don't need these anymore," Lotor tells him, and his fingers move to the blindfold.

Shiro works his jaw. There's a sick tremor moving through him, from his center out. He can't say _No_ , he can't say _Stop_. He always forgets he can't say no to Lotor. He _always forgets._

Lotor peels off the blindfold and eye patches, quick and deft, and Shiro can't keep himself from squinting up, eyes watering. The Prince looks uninjured, well-fed, and healthy, though there are tired lavender shadows under his eyes, visible even in the darkened room, and he tsks when he sees the clamp.

The open door casts in a patch of light from the hall. Shiro focuses on it rigidly as Lotor takes something from his robe, inserts it, and twists the clamp open with a _snap_ that makes Shiro's arm twitch in his lap and the hum at the back of his skull abruptly cut off. The clamp comes apart and falls into the bedclothes. Shiro doesn't look. He might still be able to salvage this.

"Come with me," Lotor says.

Shiro stands without thinking about it, steps toward him, follows him out the door of Keith's quarters. His shakes are all gone, too suddenly to be natural; his hands are steady and his pace is balanced and even. No one is outside; the hall is clear in both directions, the lights set low in deep night-cycle mode.

Ice runs down Shiro's spine. "How did you get in there?" he says with numb lips. "Who's guarding me?"

Lotor gives him a glance, walking ahead. "Look only at me, please."

Shiro does. He doesn't like this. He can't look away. He wants to stop walking, but his legs keep to Lotor's measured pace.

Things are coming together in his head, falling into pattern with a _click-click-click_. The Prince never uses imperative in the meetings, or around Allura or any of the others, and Shiro always forgets. He tries to frame the thought, fails, tries again. He _can't say no_ to Lotor.

There's no salvaging this.

"If you've hurt them, Lotor, if you've hurt any of them, I am going to kill you. I will find a way," he says, and he doesn't think Lotor makes the mistake of thinking his light breathlessness is casual.

Lotor glances back again for a longer look, and his mouth tightens, though he doesn't order Shiro to stop talking. "Am I really the one you should be seeking to kill, paladin? I did not do this to you. We are both victims here."

Rage might be a way to lock his body up. Shiro's vision goes dark and light, and tunnels down; something hits his shoulder. The wall. Lotor's elbow shoves under his other arm and he's looking down at Lotor's front, at their feet which continue to move. Shiro gulps air, hanging his head, and doesn't look up again. He can't look where they're going. _Look only at me,_ Lotor told him, and Lotor will have to steer him around obstacles, which he seems annoyingly capable of doing without even slowing down.

A few hundred steps and the edges of his vision aren't as hazy, though they're still washing light and dark with his heartbeat. He's lost track of where they are. The floors of all the personnel corridors on the castle look generally the same. "Where are we going," he grits out.

"That is none of your concern," Lotor says. "Though I wonder. If I took you to the hangar, would the black lion open to us again?"

Not if it's listening to him at all. Shiro stays quiet. He's never been able to tell if Black still hears him, never gotten more than a vague sense of _size_ and _age_ and _reluctance._ When they form Voltron, it's because _they_ want to, and even with him as the conduit his team has the power and skill and resonance now to make it work. He hopes they've felt how proud he is.

"Perhaps if I put the black bayard in your hand," Lotor continues. "Even inert, it can be used as a key, after all. I could fold your hand around it."

Then they'd find out if Shiro's hand can melt a bayard. Shiro suspects not, but it would be interesting to try. His chest hurts; he's going breathless again, but Lotor isn't slowing the pace, his elbow under Shiro's arm and vice-grip on Shiro's shoulder effortlessly towing him along even as he takes more of Shiro's weight.

"I wonder what would happen if I commanded you to make it transform," Lotor muses. "Despite all else, I am my father's son and so the black bayard came to my hand easily, but you are demonstrably able to fly the lion. There's no reason you should be unable to wield the bayard as well. A command, hmmm, wouldn't that be easier? To make your soul find its shape."

Shiro stumbles, stumbles again. There's an iron band around his ribs and he can't _breathe,_ can't _see,_ can't _breathe._ He can barely hear Lotor through the noise in his head, so loud it's going all the way up the scale like static, like the ringing of a pure bell tone.

"—if you can't, you can't, I suppose, though it would be disappointing for the witch to make me a defective present. I shall just have to ask her when I deliver—" And Lotor drops him.

Shiro hits the deck hard, a puppet with its strings cut, and can't tell whether he hits his head or not with the other noise still ringing through him so loud. He pulls his hand out of the deckplate, melting a furrow, and tries to brace himself up. His hand just sinks in again, making another nice hole. His left arm is trembling like a leaf and it's not great to imagine faceplanting into molten deckplate. C'mon legs, _work_.

"Don't you _ever_ shut up?" he snarls at Lotor, hoping the fucker will come back into range.

Lotor smirks. "Why should I?" He takes a step back, to a formal stance. "Paladin, stand up."

Shiro clutches the floor and stays sitting, swaying against sudden dizziness. There's drops of red on the floor in front of him, some smoking to smears of char on the hot metal with a much too familiar smell. Lovely. The smell evokes the taste and the taste evokes a jolt of nausea.

"Stand _up,_ " Lotor tries again. "Look at me!"

Shiro jerks his head away, over to the side. _No_ still sticks in his throat; he can't say it. "Go fuck yourself," he hisses instead, each word clear and precise. "You're not taking me anywhere. You want to tie this up neat and tidy, kill me. Didn't your mother teach you how to clean up your own mess?"

"The witch is not my mother," Lotor cracks out, and _finally,_ he's angry. Shiro meets his eyes and Lotor takes another step back.

"You had better run, prince," Shiro says. "I don't care if you were her cats'-paw in this or if you were ignorant. You used me. You had better not come within my reach again."

He gave Lotor his _bayard._ He would have turned himself in at the Kral Zera if Lotor asked it; just to prop up a throne-snatch he'd have given himself and the black lion and all hope of Voltron back to the Galra. Back, eventually, to Haggar. There's nothing in his stomach, but revulsion crawls up his back, making him shudder.

The violation is worse because Lotor should have been the first to realize. Shiro remembers the light, testing tone he had used for his suggestions — seeing how far Shiro would go, what he would agree to — there's no way in hell he hadn't suspected the control. He's been so quick to notice Haggar's touch in everything else.

Lotor backs up several more steps, prudently. "My interests align with yours. Did it not turn out for the best?"

"I don't care." Shiro bares his teeth. "I'll kill you. I'll kill you," he croons, and he's never felt so close to the arena. He's melted close to a semicircle around himself and he's running out of safe places to put his human hand, the metal uncomfortably hot under his haunches, but he doesn't try to turn his hand off, just crawls backward enough to get his feet under himself.

His vision is still tunneled, his brain focused down to line and shape and doing strange things to the palette of his surroundings, what they call _seeing red._ His head either hurts or doesn't hurt, he can't tell; he's too dizzy to keep his balance on his own, but he can lean against the wall and push himself up, sweating with effort, and finally, finally let his arms come up into guard. It takes several gasps to get enough air to complete the threat. "Like— like I killed Sendak. Your mother — the monster — can bring you back from the dead."

"You would understand how that works," Lotor allows, all humor vanished now, and watches Shiro closely as he retreats another several meters farther down the hall. Shiro wishes he could follow, but it's all he can do to stay on his feet. He almost goes to wipe his nose with his right hand before catching himself and using his shoulder instead. Burn his face off by accident, what a great way to go.

He could, though. He looks down at himself and it's so damn enticing. If the witch is watching, she already knows that they've caught on.

He really should. Before she uses him to do something worse.

"I suggest you hurry," Lotor says into a comm, tone snippy, then closes it with a click. "Paladin. I did not, in fact, harm any of your team. Wait a moment, and you can verify."

Shiro considers. It's tempting, but... "I'm no paladin," he says. They don't need him any more, and he would rather kill, rather die, than be used again.

He knows just how to do it: upward, between the ribs to the heart, not that ribs matter much to his hand. Just as fast as his throat, but cleaner for the kids to deal with. He touches the spot, smokes a dark-edged hole in his pale gray undershirt and a mild reddening burn on the skin beneath, taking short sharp breaths so his mind can rev his body through the instincts that would stop him.

When he draws his hand back there's a bright pink spot on his chest and it's not blood; Shiro looks up to spot Lance far on the other side of Lotor, kneeling at the head of the hallway, pale as a ghost and his sniper rifle bayard unwavering. Shiro freezes for a second, but Lance doesn't fire, so Shiro lines up again. He'd rather take care of this himself, while he can, than make any of them do it.

The pink spot of the laser sight twitches and something spins Shiro around hard, his right shoulder hitting the wall sharply enough to drive an abbreviated scream out of him. _Pain._ Shit shit shit, holy fuck. His left hand clamps on to the flesh of his shoulder, just above the socket-line of his prosthetic, and bright red blood wells between his knuckles and runs down the back of his hand. Lance _shot him._ His right hand is still lit, magenta-white and deadly, but searing pain shoots from his neck to his fingertips when he tries to lift it. Lance shot him in the shoulder to disable his arm.

Shiro slides down the wall. He can't keep pressure with just one hand. Blood is running hot down his heavy right arm, charring to black flakes that scatter off his hand in a continuous bright-lit curl of smoke, and it stinks. Half the pain is distant and unclear, shock damping down his human nervous system, and the rest is bright, immediate, unbearable. There's damage to one of the artificial nerves.

He tries not to bite his tongue. Instead he screams, as loud as Champion ever did, and cracks his head back into the wall. Again. Again.

Someone grabs him and he snarls but doesn't bite; they drag him away from the wall and he doesn't fight them, just tilts his chin upward so his throat is wide open. "C'mon," he says raggedly. "Come _on._ "

"No," Keith tells him, in Blade uniform with the mask on, holding Shiro down while Pidge and Hunk bind things in furious silence around his shoulder, his arm, and his hand finally fizzles out. Shiro tries to beat his head against the floor and Hunk dives to restrain him, an elbow looping under Shiro's jaw and other hand cupping the back of his skull.

Shiro pants, and swallows, and feels the pulse in his throat hammer against Hunk's armor. It's tempting to relax in the submission hold, just let his neck go soft and let himself drift away, but they're _not safe_ if they won't _take care of him._ He screams a little in frustration, and twists until he runs out of energy which is very quickly, and then just breathes with his eyes hooded, heart still hammer-fast and head starting to feel distant no matter how hard he's holding on.

Where's Lotor? Shiro remembers, _again_ , with an unpleasant jerk, and twists around until he can see. The Prince hasn't moved, still twenty meters down the hall, back against the wall and hands up in surrender, watching their huddle with a pinched look as Lance holds him at riflepoint. Shiro wonders if he learned whatever he was trying to learn.

Shiro catches his gaze and raises his bloody, shaky left hand in a gesture from the Arena. The sanitized version simply means _next time you won't survive._ He doesn't give Lotor the sanitized version. The Prince's eyes narrow at the obscenity, and he looks away; message received.

"Well, fuck," Pidge says, her hands on the bandage trembling badly enough that he can feel it through the red pain of his shoulder. "If we blindfold you again, will you stop trying to kill yourself?"

"It's too late for that," Shiro says hoarsely. "Pidge, she can _possess people._ "

Keith tilts his head, face unreadable in his mask. "A kamikaze strike. That's what you're worried about."

"I'm no use to her now," Shiro breathes. "Except for that. Why not? High risk, high reward."

"Or maybe she just wants you to die," Hunk snaps. "Leave us without a black paladin and without Voltron, and hit us where we live." He's really, really angry. Shiro's not sure he's ever heard Hunk so angry.

"Keith can—" he starts.

" _No,_ " Keith says, "I _can't._ Even if I sat in the lion, don't lie to yourself that we'd be able to form Voltron. We'd be fucked."

"Yeah," Pidge agrees. "Not after watching you kill yourself. So sorry not sorry, you're stuck here with us."

"Fffffffffffffffffff," Shiro hisses. He wants to deny it but they're making a frightening amount of sense; it's not good, not something they want widely known, how stupidly fragile Voltron can be. "At least restrain me. Sedate me, put a stun collar on me, something. Don't leave me thinking I could t—," he has to stop and breathe. "Turn on you at any time." Hunk's fingers are on the side of Shiro's throat now, monitoring his pulse, and there are periodic waves of black and gray sparkles. Shiro struggles to stay aware. "I don't want to live like that."

"It would please the witch to build in penalties," Lotor says tonelessly, still far down the hall. Shiro doesn't bother to look for him. Keith is saying _we did not agree to that_ in a tone that usually precedes some kind of blood on the floor and Lotor is saying _another compulsion broken_ and _proof_ and Keith shouldn't listen to Lotor, he should never listen, but his head is really floating now and the words of warning won't form. Everything is delaminating, the layers of the world frizzing apart under the pounding of his head and the shocking twanging zips of pain from his fingers to his collarbones; to his human nerves the injury is just a sullen hot dullness now, but painkillers can only do so much. He sniffs and sniffs, but his nose is running again, and the taste of blood is strong in his mouth. He coughs, trying to breathe, and it hurts his head so bad his vision whites out, tunneling down to a narrow field with bright-shadowed stripes and zigzags all around the edges.

There's a wolf with neon eyes, staring at him gravely, and Shiro stares back. He long ago accepted that he would die confused. Now that he's at the point of it, he finds he doesn't mind so much.

But Lance is here, and he takes Shiro's red left hand and holds it hard in his own, the blood tacky against his gauntlets. "Don't worry, buddy. We're taking you to the Olkari."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slightly spoilery warning notes:
> 
> Throughout the chapter Kuron believes he is Shiro and has self-blaming thoughts. He requests sensory deprivation to prevent Haggar from spying through him, and agrees to receive painkillers, but the drug he is given has powerful sedative effect as well. The effects of the mind control prevent him from asserting boundaries, especially against Lotor. There is no sexual assault, but Lotor is revealed to have used the mind control to nonconsensually force Kuron to support him.
> 
> When Kuron knows there is no chance of hiding from Haggar the fact that he and all the paladins have found out that he is under her partial control, he tries to commit suicide in order to protect the paladins from anything Haggar might make him do. He is prevented by one of the paladins shooting him (non-fatally), but bears no grudge about getting shot.


End file.
